Thank You

Error.

For more than 20 years, I have been a columnist and Economics Editor for Barron's. When you write for a print publication on a weekly basis, as I do, there is time for feedback from editors and fact-checkers, not to mention the time you yourself have to reflect on what you've written before you publish. Bloggers, by contrast, seem to have no such restraints. The result is that they often sound like they're shouting out whatever comes into their minds, except what they've just shouted goes out into the world.

In normal discourse, you'd expect that critics of an article would read the article before writing their critique. Instead, Weisenthal and Krugman limit themselves to critiquing only the words used on the cover to announce the story—and in the process, they misinterpret those very words.

Had they even skimmed my story, they would have noticed that the analogy made with Greece's current crisis to the future crisis the U.S. economy might face did not originate with me. Rather, it comes from a July 2010 Issue Brief published by the serious, sober, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The Brief, called "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis," has also been cited in more recent CBO publications, as my story also points out. In that Brief, the risk faced by the U.S. was specifically compared to fiscal crises in Argentina, Ireland, and Greece, with sections discussing each country.

My article quotes the CBO Brief as stating that "a review of fiscal crises in Argentina, Ireland, and Greece reveals instructive common features and differences."

I then wrote: "One difference, of course, is that these economies are much smaller and weaker than the powerhouse economy of the U.S. So the U.S. would presumably cope better with the shock. But one advantage of being small is that it makes you a candidate for bailouts from larger economies. In contrast, the U.S. will be both too big to fail and too big to bail, a potentially toxic combination that could infect all the world's economies."

Perhaps their failure to actually read my article left Weisenthal and Krugman incapable of understanding the Barron's headline they did read. The statement on the cover said "We Can Be Like Greece." To be "like" something of course does not mean that you are turning into that thing; it means only that you will resemble it in certain respects. Thus, I did not accuse President Obama of "Turning America Into Greece," as Weisenthal wrote in his own headline, or as Krugman repeated in the first sentence of his blog. In effect, I only echoed the analogy made by the Congressional Budget Office.

Such behavior is not new with Krugman. His response to my 2006 book, Econospinning, which has critical chapters quoting copiously from his articles and columns, prompted a similar response on his part. But if he and Weisenthal actually want to read my article and comment, I'd be happy to respond.